Robert Colvile is a writer and senior comment editor at the Telegraph, who cares more about politics and policy than is probably healthy - for his newest pieces, please see here. He tweets as @rcolvile.

The pizza theory of economics

Hanson, our last heavy materials company, has just been sold to the Germans. Should we panic?

Mining: an industry lost in the 'value chain' Â

I ask because of a theory a mathematician friend has run by me about intellectual property laws. This sees IP legislation not just as a way of Hollywood studios extending their copyright, or drug companies maximising their profits. It is instead part of a concerted effort on the part of the West to avoid the flattening of the world – the steady erosion of our competitive advantage until, as the author Neal Stephenson posited, America is left with an economy based around music, movies, microcode and pizza delivery.

IP law is, this theory runs, a doomed effort at keeping know-how away from places such as India and China – after all, if they've got the experience to write first-class computer code in Shanghai, who'll hire expensive Americans in Seattle?

This is an emotional argument, but it's not one I agree with. Although US copyright law is too draconian, we definitely need some form of IP law that allows people to reap the fruits of their intellectual efforts for a defined period of time, otherwise there's no point in making those blockbuster movies or investing billions in researching new kinds of drug.

But more generally, this theory is part of a whole strain of gloomy, our-lifestyle-is-doomed-by-China talk that, when you look at the big picture, doesn't really hold up. My advice is not to get hung up on news stories about GDP upswings and downswings, balance of pay deficits and the death of manufacturing, and remember two key buzzwords: 'value chain' and 'natural rate of growth'.

'Value chain' is simple: we don't build ships any more. We don't mine coal. We don't build cars. But we do carry out fantastically complicated transactions in the City, or write software at start-up firms in Cambridge or Swindon. Economic growth for rich countries is about getting a share of a new market, riding it for all it's worth and then moving on to something new and more profitable. If you can't compete in a given industry, it's a good sign that you shouldn't try.

So when Japan starts building cars, or India writing code, it's a sign that their economies are moving up the value chain. But by then other economies should already have discovered something which lets us make just as much money, or even more, for less effort.

And it turns out that uncovering these new income streams, and creating companies which can compete in and dominate them, is best done in a society with the freedom and expertise to innovate technically, professionally and culturally, with a decent education system and liberal economic and political policies. Which, although you might quibble about the 'decent education system' part, means countries like us.

'Natural rate of growth' is equally reassuring – and also where I really wish I could draw a diagram. A 'mature' capitalist economy – ours, for example – tends to grow at a steady 2-3 per cent a year, which can be boosted or retarded by politicians' tinkering but not fundamentally altered. The graph of Britain's GDP growth since the Industrial Revolution kicked off is, if I remember my classes correctly, essentially a straight line, World Wars excepted.

Developing countries have a different, higher rate of 'natural' growth – but our GDP per head is still way above theirs. What occasionally happens, though, when the stars align and the right political/social/economic criteria are met, is that a developing country will launch itself towards the developed world – that income per head will rise sharply over a decade or two until it begins to approach, and converge with the rich-countries line.

Taiwan, South Korea, Japan have all made the leap – and, you can argue, China and India are on the same trajectory (the key question, of course, is whether the transformation can be completed – China's GDP will overtake the US's sooner or later through sheer weight of numbers, but there could still be millions of people living in poverty unrecognisable in the West). But these growth rates have their own gravitational attraction – once you've configured your society correctly (which can be a tremendously difficult thing to do), it's quite hard to knock it off course (and, in the case of poorly governed African countries, vice versa).

All of which is a long-winded way of adopting the Michael Winner theory of economic competition: calm down, dear. Economic growth is not a zero-sum game: they grow, we grow with them. We shouldn't weep for our cement industry, or fear that we'll be left just doing pizza delivery – if you try to keep industries on life support (as, arguably, we did with mining) it just makes the eventual reallocation of resources more traumatic for those suddenly unable to get other jobs.

What we should do is make it as easy as possible – primarily through education – for people to embrace new industries and opportunities: in other words, a bit of creative destruction never did anyone any harm.